PARRHESIA NUMBER 1 • 2006 • 88 – 111

SADISM AND MASOCHISM - A SYMPTOMATOLOGY

OF ANALYTIC AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY?

Jack Reynolds

There has recently been a plethora of attempts to understand the key differences that

separate the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy1, often involving either

painstaking descriptions of the divergent argumentative techniques and

methodologies that concern them, or comparatively examining in detail the work of

certain major theorists in both traditions (e.g. Rawls and Derrida, Lewis and

Deleuze2). While partly drawing on these two approaches, in this particular essay I

instead propose a rather more speculative way of teasing out the differences between

them, interpreting them through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s non-oppositional

typology of sadism and masochism, as it is expressed in Difference and Repetition

and ‘Coldness and Cruelty’.

Although a counter-intuitive typology to advocate, in what follows I will argue that

the analytic tradition evinces the more sadistic tendencies and the continental tradition

the more masochistic tendencies. Of course, this is not to reductively suggest that

each and every analytic philosopher literally suffers, ad hominem, a sadistic

pathology, which is clearly not the case – there are plenty of individual philosophers

who trouble or fall between the terms of this taxonomy. Equally, nor does it entail that

philosophy itself is, by definition, pathological, despite the fact that Wittgenstein,

Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Louis Sass3, and Deleuze himself, among many others,

have long associated philosophy with at least a certain experience of madness. Rather,

congruent with Deleuze’s analysis of schizophrenia in Anti-Oedipus and elsewhere,

sadism and masochism must not be understood merely according to the literal

medico-pathological sense of these terms, but more broadly as intimating an affective

and logical structure that makes possible the clinical instances that we know of and is

not reducible to them (and, as will become clear, the originally quite specific use that

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Deleuze makes of sadism and masochism in ‘Coldness and Cruelty’ is considerably

widened in their deployment in Difference and Repetition). In that sense, it is

important to note that all philosophy, including G. E. Moore’s, Gilbert Ryle’s or

Hubert Dreyfus’ ‘common-sensisms’4, presupposes and implies at least an attempted

break with law and custom as one of its preconditions, even if it is also clear that what

Deleuze calls the subjective presuppositions of common sense are nevertheless likely

to continue unrecognised on another level. It is my contention, then, that the heuristic

device of Deleuze’s sadistic and masochistic typologies helps to make perspicuous the

different ways in which these traditions generally go about trying to inaugurate this

break from common-sense. While such an ad hoc modus operandi cannot be wholly

justified, either as a prima facie proof or immanently in relation to Deleuze’s own

oeuvre5, it will nevertheless be shown that his symptomatology offers a provocative

and illuminative template for coming to grips with some of the most enduring and

significant differences between these two traditions that have been mutually non-

comprehending for much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries6. Moreover,

although this will not be able to be addressed in any detail, a secondary aim of this

essay will be to suggest that these two affective tendencies, which cannot be thought

of simply as pathological activities on the margin of normality, must be recognised by

any political philosophy worth its salt, disrupting simplistic assumptions of rationally

self-interested agents, hypothetical contracts (or thought experiments) that purport to

be morally binding, and many of the basic assumptions and devices with which

political philosophy has traditionally been concerned7. But let us consider what it is

that Deleuze has to say about sadism and masochism before returning to these bigger

questions.

The first and most important thing to ascertain from Deleuze’s analysis is that he

resists the conflation that he terms ‘the sado-masochistic entity’. In fact, he tells us

that the spurious linking of these two pathologies (which began with Krafft-Ebing,

was developed by Freud, and is arguably still dominant in contemporary attitudes

towards these phenomena) issues forth from a confusion of syndromes with the

specific symptoms involved in the two kinds of behaviour (CC 40). Not only are they

different modes of being with differing logics, but he also insists, contrary to Freud,

that the existence of a person who is a masochist, for example (and the reverse also

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applies), does not imply the existence of an antagonistic sadist who inflicts suffering

upon the masochist (and perhaps this is why there has been relatively little sustained

engagement between analytic and continental philosophers over the years: each is not

quite giving the other what they want). Deleuze argues that a genuine sadist would

never tolerate a willing masochist accomplice, and the whole point of masochism on

his analysis is that any so-called punisher must first be educated and seduced into

behaving in a manner that he terms ‘quasi-sadistic’, which he rigorously distinguishes

from sadism proper. It is not just Freud who is being targeted here, but also the

Hegelian master-slave dialectic, as well as Sartre’s reinvention of it, in which we are

envisaged to be thrown back and forth between the attitudes of sadism and masochism

in an ultimately impossible attempt to control how we are seen by others, and to

eliminate the prospect of shame and alienation before the look of the other8. For

Sartre, we can either constantly judge and objectify others and thereby seek to prevent

the emergence of our social self (what he calls being-for-others), or we can try and

induce others to see us exactly as we wish to be seen and thereby control their

subjectivity. According to Deleuze’s analyses, however, sadism and masochism are

much more stable and enduring than Sartre’s account suggests. They are more akin to

separate ways of life that admit of no such clear-cut oppositionality, and the perceived

failure of one of these two attitudes does not motivate us, as Sartre suggests, to adopt

the alternative perspective. For Deleuze, the non-oppositional differences between

these perspectives becomes incontrovertible once we employ a logic of symptoms,

which he and Derrida both argue takes us further than any ethics of truthfulness9.

Rather than this simply being a medical concern, this logic of symptoms requires

paying attention to fictional work and, in particular, to the novels of Leopold von

Sacher-Masoch (the Dutch author and progenitor of the term masochism) and the

Marquis de Sade (the more well-known French writer and progenitor of the term

sadism, who was imprisoned for his literature, as well as for his advocation of, and

engagement in, various sadistic practices). Deleuze goes so far as to acclaim Masoch,

in particular, as a “great clinician”, precisely because he manages to make clear how

different and incommensurable sadism and masochism are.

We will see the differences between these two typologies shortly, but first one

important background question needs to be posed: why exactly is Deleuze interested

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in these typologies? Without resorting to the speculation of ad hominem arguments,

we can get the beginning of an answer to this question by recognising that ‘Coldness

and Cruelty’ was written in 1967, a year before what is arguably his major

philosophical work, Difference and Repetition, and in the later work he attempts to

establish, contrary to much of the philosophical tradition, that repetition is, and never

could be, the simple repetition of the same. Instead, he argues that all repetition

involves the instantiation of difference, although not necessarily to the same extent, or

in the same way. Deleuze insists that if the repetition of difference is possible (and

this possibility is bracketed away in gesture only), it is as much opposed to moral law

as it is to natural law (DR 5). He then briefly discusses what he considers to be the

two major ways of overturning the kind of repetition of the same that he associates

with the moral law – sadism and masochism. In sadism and masochism, repetition is

said to run wild, of its own accord, and is no longer related to experience or to the

pleasure that is gained or anticipated to be gained (cf. CC 120). Repetition is sought

for its own sake and this can be problematic (i.e. it can lead to pathological fetishes),

but, for Deleuze, again, the meaning of these terms cannot be confined to this. Rather,

sadism and masochism are understood as the affective dimension of a certain

transcendental structure and privileged synthesis of time that he calls repetition-for-

itself (i.e. repetition that is not tied to identity). There are some important connections

between his analysis of the repetition-for-itself evinced in sadism and masochism, and

his understanding of the difference-in-itself at stake in the futural synthesis of time

that he associates with the eternal return of difference, and what he terms the

“apprenticeship of learning” (DR 164). This latter phrase is intended to evoke

experiences where one is radically and traumatically disrupted, forced to instigate

new ways of existing to cope with difference and adversity (difference hence comes

first, rather than embodied coping techniques, etc.). In both of these affirmations we

reach a difficult point in Deleuze’s work, where the empirical, the moral, and the

transcendental, all coalesce. Is the repetition of sadism and masochism, which is freed

from the moral law, akin to the repetition of difference-in-itself? If so, this might

seem to constitute a warning about any uncritical adoption of the Deleuzian position,

which, even if it doesn’t entail a pathological condition, certainly risks the experience

of what he and Guattari call chaos in Anti-Oedipus. I address some of these critical

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questions about Deleuze’s work in more detail elsewhere, but let us leave them aside

in order to more concretely fill out this typology of sadism and masochism.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze both sums up and extends the more specific

findings of ‘Coldness and Cruelty’. He tells us that sadism functions by ascending to

principles, but principles understood as some kind of original force, whereas

masochism descends towards consequences to which one submits with all-too-perfect

attention to detail, and it tends to involve demonstration by absurdity and working to

rule (DR 5). At first glance, such a description might seem to suggest that it would be

more appropriate to label the continental camp sadistic and the analytic camp

masochistic, rather than the reverse that I am trying to establish here. We should not

rush too quickly to such a conclusion, however. In ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, where this

difference is given more prolonged attention, sadism is said to focus on the

institutions that render the law unnecessary and even obsolete. Replaced by a dynamic

model of action and authority, sadism seeks the degradation of all laws and the

establishment of a superior power. In the work of de Sade himself, it is important to

note the ongoing conviction that it is the law (understood as norms, conventions, etc.)

that enables tyrants to exist, and certainly various psychological experiments show

that there is at least some empirical plausibility to this. But, for Deleuze and de Sade

alike, the impetus behind sadism is not simply the desire for power over others.

Rather, it seeks to suspend what Deleuze, in Logic of Sense, calls the entire other-

structure itself (LS 353) and the key aspect of sadism consists in the idea that the law

can be best transcended through a kind of institutional anarchy that ascends to

reasoned principles, but reasons and principles that somehow exceed and promulgate

themselves (this is perhaps what Deleuze endorses in his repeated invocations of

“crowned anarchy” – DR 224, 265, 304). It is this manner in which sadism

foregrounds an excess of reasons and principles, and uses them to question our

everyday normativity, that we should take note of in relation to the attempt to thus

characterise the analytic tradition.

Without being able to devote substantial attention to the analytic use of thought

experiments here, it is perhaps sufficient to briefly consider the widely discussed

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prisoner’s dilemma. It has been claimed that thousands of articles were written about

the problem in the 1970s and 80s and philosophical engagements of the Anglo-

American variety constituted a significant proportion of these. So, what is the

dilemma? We are asked to imagine that two people have been arrested for some

relatively serious crime, say robbing a bank, and both of the people involved are

rationally self-interested and care more about their personal welfare than that of their

colleague. The prosecutor offers each of them one of four possible outcomes that

might eventuate depending upon whether they confess or remain silent, and

depending upon what their accomplice does: 1. if Robber 1 confesses and their

accomplice remains silent all charges against Robber 1 will be dropped and their

testimony will be used to ensure that their accomplice does serious time; 2. if Robber

2 confesses while Robber 1 remains silent, Robber 2 will go free while Robber 1 does

the prison time; 3. if both confess there will be two convictions on the serious robbery

charge, but both will get early parole; 4. if both remain silent, it will result in minor

sentences for each (say firearms possession charges). The basic dilemma here is that

considered in terms of what their accomplice does, each prisoner is better off by

confessing than remaining silent, but the outcome obtained when both confess is

nevertheless worse for each than the outcome that would have been obtained had both

remained silent. As Steven Kuhn suggests, “a common view is that the puzzle

illustrates a conflict between individual and group rationality: a group whose

members pursue rational self-interest may all end up worse off than a group whose

members act contrary to rational self-interest10”.

Now, there is much to be said about the way in which different social pressures and

desires are simplified into this grid of four possible outcomes11. Perhaps the

circumscribed conditions of this thought experiment invalidate conclusions extended

from this process, especially in regard to the complexities of social and political

problems. But without dwelling on this here, it needs to be pointed out that the

prisoner’s dilemma is neither unusual, nor uncharacteristic, of the analytic tradition in

employing logic and reasoned principles to suggest that perhaps something is amiss

with our everyday norms. It arguably applies to most theories of rational choice,

including utilitarianism12, decision and game theory, as well as the use to which many

thought experiments are made to serve. In the analytic tradition, problems are

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frequently examined in this decontextualised and recontextualised manner that

ensures that the principles involved take on a life of their own, far exceeding the

pragmatic, just as Deleuze suggests is the case with sadism. Of course, it must be

acknowledged that these analytic extensions of reason remain restricted largely to the

realm of philosophical discourse alone, instead of becoming tantamount to a

programmatic way of life as they did with de Sade. Moreover, unlike Sade (but

perhaps more like sadism) these excesses of principle are not necessarily deliberately

deployed in order to overturn the law and convention. In that sense there are some

significant differences between the analytic tradition and Sade, but let me reaffirm

that I want merely to illustrate a sadistic tendency in the analytic camp (which need

not have anything to do with the inflicting of pain on Deleuze’s view), and a

masochistic tendency in the continental camp. While neither are fully fledged

versions of sadism and masochism (because there are individual philosophers who

constitute borderline cases and exceptions), it is nevertheless the case that both tend in

the one direction significantly moreso than the other.

By contrast with sadism, Deleuze tells us that masochism highlights the way in which

it is the contract, or agreement, between parties and people that generates the law13,

before then focusing in detail on the inevitability of the way in which the subsequent

development of the law then ignores or contravenes the very declaration that brought

it into being. For him, these are very different ways of treating and overturning the

law. Rather than rely on the moral law of convention, sadism surges upwards to find

rationality, living its own life, devoid of reference to custom, but masochism

immanently shows the unjustifiable severity of law in the performative enaction of it.

To put it more simply, masochism wants to expose that the law inevitably forgets it

origins in a free contract and all too quickly becomes violent. As Deleuze says, “To

imagine that a quasi-contract is at the origin of society is to invoke conditions that are

necessarily invalidated as soon as the law comes into being” (CC 91). Without

digressing unduly – or perhaps agreeing with Deleuze and Guattari that all philosophy

is a digression, although some produce more interesting and useful concepts than

others – it is worth observing that Derrida’s own many analyses of the law and

constitutions tend to make very similar points14.

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But we can draw this contrast more tightly by noting that Deleuze also intimates that

there is an important difference between sadism and masochism in their relation to the

calculable. Number, quantity, and quantitative evaluations and repetitions are the

obsessions of sadism. There is a focus upon the calculable and the numerable (CC

70). It is a certain kind of rationality taken to the extreme, freed of its moorings.

Arguably this focus on number is built into the general scientism that pervades

Western culture, but it also seems reasonably uncontroversial to suggest that a focus

on the calculable and the measurable are an important feature of analytic philosophy,

especially when contrasted to the European tradition, both in regard to its ahistorical

preoccupation with rationality and its continual flirtations with seeing philosophy’s

raison d’etre as being purely about clarifying the findings of science. Of course, this

is a long and complicated story that cannot be adequately treated here. Nevertheless, it

is worth noting that even in the apparently distantly related field of moral philosophy

there is something close to an agreement that theories must at least be compatible

with the latest scientific and social scientific analyses15. In the realm of political

philosophy, the analytic preoccupation with the calculable is evident in its synchronic

focus on issues concerning distributive justice, rather than with issues to do with

domination and oppression that have been the focus of Hegel, Marx, the

existentialists, and, in fact, arguably all those working in the European tradition which

is substantially indebted to the master-slave dialectic in its different guises and

reinventions. Indeed, while Deleuze problematises the reified opposition at the basis

of the Hegelian and Sartrean formulations of this dialectic of social life, he

nevertheless agrees that a focus on the distribution of goods is fundamentally an

activity of ressentiment that, “distributes morsels in order to separate out the modes of

human existence” (DR 282). Suffice to say that this kind of treatment of the

calculable is clearly vastly different from that holding sway in contemporary Anglo-

American political philosophy.

Indeed, while objections can no doubt be raised to trouble this suggestion that the

analytic tradition evinces a kind of sadism, it is nevertheless clear that the calculable

and the numerable has been comparatively disparaged in the European tradition. The

continental tradition has been heavily influenced by Marx, for whom any undue focus

on the calculable and distributive justice would be a kind of commodity fetishism that

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needs to pay more attention to the means of production, as well as by other figures

like Kierkegaard, who railed against systematising rationality and insisted on the

existential and the lived. For him, singularities aren’t susceptible to calculation, and

responsibility likewise breaks with the calculable and the order of generality, much as

Derrida also contends in The Gift of Death, his evocative ruminations on

Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Skipping important intermediaries like Bergson

and Nietzsche in order to provide merely the most basic of genealogies, moving into

the twentieth century, Heidegger, in Being and Time, gave formative significance to

moods and pre-rational attunements like Angst over the rational and the deliberative.

He also prioritised the practical and ready-to-hand modes of coping with the world

that are epistemologically and ontologically prior to calculable present-at-hand

analyses of it, which might delve into considerations of size, shape, colour,

configurations, molecular composition, etc16. In the French existentialist tradition that

took up aspects of Heidegger’s work, the calculable has continued to be decried in

favour of according greater attention to phenomenological experience, whether it be

in Sartre’s affirmations of our radical freedom and associated experiences like

anguish, nausea, and shame, Camus’ diagnosis of the absurd and subsequent call for

action (essentially to abandon the desire for calculating how best to achieve order), or

in the ambiguity that Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir find to be constitutive of

embodied existence. And this turn to the body is itself important. After all, both Freud

and Deleuze share the conviction that the masochist focuses upon bodily experience

and the way in which subjectivity emerges through embodied desire, and it is hence

perhaps unsurprising that it is largely continental philosophers (both feminist and

otherwise) who are concerned with the philosophy of the body, as opposed to the

plethora of analytic philosophers of mind. These terminological differences can only

begin to hint at the disparate treatment the body has received in these traditions17.

While a concern with the body has continued in the work of the key poststructuralist

thinkers (think of Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida, at least in On Touching – Jean-Luc

Nancy), for them the insistence on the priority of the incalculable sometimes also

threatens to become a denigration of solutions and of calculability per se18. Without

being able to deal with all of those who are associated with this term, it can be shown

that, in different ways, Derrida, Deleuze and Negri all insist on the priority of the

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incalculable over the calculable19 (and problems over solutions), just as we have seen

that the masochistic concern with repetition is averse to the purely quantitative.

Indeed, there is often something close to an endorsement and privileging of

masochism in Deleuze’s own oeuvre, and while it is true that he also speaks of a

hyper-calculus, it is difficult to give any content to this calculus that he associates

with the dice throw, chance, and the affirmation of them that is best captured in

Difference and Repetition’s third, futural synthesis of time (which, we might add, is

precisely about the incalculability of the future). Moreover, in Logic of Sense and A

Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze draws a radical distinction between the time of Aion and

Chronos: Aion refers to the indefinite time of the event, which is always disrupting

the time of the present by dividing into both the past and the future, whereas Chronos

is the time of measure and the present (TP 262)20. Deleuze subtly but persistently

privileges the incalculable time of Aion (cf. LS 126, 151) and it is for related reasons

that Paul Patton has commented that, “the politics of becoming minor asserts the

power of the non-denumerable against that of the denumerable” (cf. TP 471)21. We

have already seen that such a perspective entails a rejection of the privileging of

questions concerning distributive justice in the political realm, but to put Deleuze and

Guattari’s position in more positive terms, this means that “the question of desire’s

involvement in its own involuntary servitude is the fundamental problem of political

philosophy” (TP 29). In fact, if sadism and masochism also have this transcendental

import that Deleuze intimates, if they capture one aspect of the synthesis of time and

experience that is at work in all of us, as seems to be his implication in Difference and

Repetition, this installs time and affect at the heart of politics: there can be no politics

that is not bound up in a lived response to the problem of repetition.

For our purposes, however, it needs to be emphasised that the relation to time

involved in these two modalities is markedly distinct. Although both aim, according

to Deleuze, to suspend the time of the living-present and open on to the time of Aion

– i.e. the time of the eternal and the event (LS 188) – sadism and masochism do this

very differently; they involve a respective acceleration and deceleration of time (cf.

CC 71). Things speed up with the calculations of time and the sadistic expansion of

principles beyond law; the living-present becomes so compressed and hurried as to be

obliterated (it must be insisted here, however, that the analytic tradition constitutes

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only an aborted sadism, temporally speaking, because it never quite takes the concern

with the rational and calculable to their excessive limits, because of the

methodological reliance on intuition that returns us to the realm of common sense and

the living present22). On the other hand, masochism is about a certain experience of

waiting that tries not to anticipate or circumscribe the future by weighing it down with

the expectations that are built into the habitual present. As we see detailed in Sacher-

Masoch’s novels, both the seduction and the rituals involved may be insidiously slow,

allowing a relationship to slowly transmogrify and allowing the depth of one’s co-

implication with their interlocutor, who can never be an unequivocal master, to build

and build. In this respect, it is perhaps no coincidence that Deleuze is also very

enamoured with the literature of Beckett and Proust, who, although very different, can

both still be said to instantiate a different and more masochistic relation to time; the

one prioritising waiting and the other a memorial ritualism. While it is not simply a

contrast between active and passive that is being invoked here, we might sum up by

suggesting that there is an essential impatience bound up with sadism (it wants to

promulgate greater and greater numbers of repetitions, whether they be beatings or

citations of journal articles!) and a kind of eternal patience at the heart of masochism

(which is attentive to the manner and form of the unwinding of repetition, to that

about repetition which is unrepresentable, rather than the quantitative perpetuation of

more)23. As would be apparent, it is my contention that analytic philosophy is best

characterised as a philosophy of sadistic impatience and continental philosophy is

more aptly described as one of masochistic and eternal patience. Despite the

perjorative connotations that are usually associated with the prefix im, however, we

should not assume (in this context and perhaps any other) that patience is a virtue and

its lack a vice. On the contrary, what I am designating as impatience is both necessary

and important as we will see. But, beyond their already enumerated attitudes towards

that which is calculable, there are at least three further ways of trying to justify this

claim that I will pursue: 1. the empirical practice of these two groups in their shared

relation to publication and research requirements; 2. the stylistic and methodological

differences involved in their research; 3. their respective metaphysical and ontological

commitments which are tightly linked in with their tacit philosophies of time.

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First then, although quantitative repetitions are vital for all academics these days in

the ‘publish or perish’ mentality that most governments and universities have

successfully inculcated into their retinue, it is nevertheless the case that the form that

this has assumed in the two fields has been divergent. We have already made the

general observation that most analytic philosophers aren’t particularly concerned with

the history of philosophy but instead pay more attention to the latest developments

among their contemporaries in their specialised field. In terms of journal publications,

this practice encourages a proliferation of more and more nuanced replies to prior

articles in a given journal, often resulting in, ‘Reply to a reply by… (add the author’s

name)’. This is something that rarely, if ever, happens in journals that are devoted to

European philosophy. Moreover, while the analytic preoccupation is with publishing

in the best journals (ranked against one another in terms of frequency of citation) and

with the reading of such journals being indispensable, in European philosophy, on the

other hand, there is more of a preoccupation with monographs and edited collections,

and a correspondingly lesser interest in journals. Significantly, in regard to our

concern with time and (im)patience, the European tradition also evinces far more of a

concern with oeuvres (and epochs) and the relation that a philosopher bears to certain

canonical figures in that lineage. Continental philosophers are frequently labelled a

Heideggerian, a Derridean, a Levinasian, a Sartrean, a Husserlian, even a Deleuzian,

but this naming process obscures the more significant point that it is based on,

however, which is that continental philosophers tend to engage with the work of

someone, say for example Heidegger (who has more than his share of acolytes),

slowly and for a long period of time (an eternity), just as we have seen Deleuze

describe masochistic relationships. Suffice to say that this practice is not so common

in analytic philosophy. Not many ever become avowed Rawlsians, Putnamians,

Lewisians, etc. They are, on the contrary, labelled epistemologists, philosophers of

science, etc.

No doubt, however, there are other ways of accounting for these empirical

differences, so let me try and develop my argument by showing how the different

styles and methodologies of the two traditions link in with this contrast between speed

(impatience) and waiting (eternal patience). Philosophers have, after all, commented

upon the stylistic differences between analytic philosophy and European philosophy

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for years24, and in this respect one need only briefly recollect Carnap’s engagement

with Heidegger, or John Searle’s interaction with Derrida, to cite but two stark

examples of this stylistic confrontation that cannot be reduced to difficulties

concerning translation. We can begin to elaborate on these differences by observing

that in European philosophy there is often a move to descend to the level of

consequences and to a hermeneutics of textual interpretation and historical context

(indeed, European journals are sometimes interested in publishing almost exclusively

exegetical essays, something that only very infrequently happens in analytic journals).

This attention to both textual interpretation and, perhaps more significantly, to matters

concerning expressive style, is especially evident in poststructuralism and is perhaps

exemplified by Derrida’s infamous remark, “there is nothing outside of the text”25, as

well as by the strategy of textual reading with which deconstruction has long been

associated. In a manner much like Deleuze associates with masochism (with its

agreements between parties that are subsequently breached), deconstruction begins

with the assumption of something like the principle of charity and of respecting

authorial intention, but then seeks to show at the level of consequences in the text (i.e.

a patterned trace of incongruities where the metaphysical rubs up against the non-

metaphysical; an undecidable word or concept that doesn’t quite fit the logic of the

argument) how such a principle proceeds to undermine and contaminate itself, and

thereby opens the text up to alternative reading(s) that do violence to the author’s

avowed intentions. Indeed, deconstruction might even be said to proceed in a manner

that is closely related to a reductio ad absurdum (which Deleuze also associates with

masochism) in that it attends with greater and greater specificity to the aporias and

tensions of a text in a manner that is designed to, if not reduce the arguments

concerned to an absurdity, at least point to their contingency and lack of necessity.

Rather than an excess of reasons and principles being seen to trouble everyday

normativity from some transcendent place, however, as was the case with the

prisoner’s dilemma and with the analytic philosopher’s attention to detail more

generally, here the analysis proceeds immanently from the level of textual

consequences and style. Sometimes this preoccupation with style and textuality,

which is a major feature of continental philosophy generally and not just the work of

Derrida, can be somewhat laboured. Who is not impatient with Derrida (or Heidegger,

or Foucault, or Deleuze, or Irigaray, etc.), at least from time to time, wishing that they

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would just tell us what they mean? Of course, this is not such a simple matter when

one is attentive, as those working in the continental tradition almost invariably are, to

the historical genealogy of concepts and ideas that persist in our manner of expression

and contain all kinds of metaphysical assumptions. Equally though, who is not also

impatient with Derrida’s sometimes incessant preambles to his talks, where apologies

for the impossible are propounded and retracted for pages on end? There is a certain

responsibility to it, but it also evinces a disposition that is characteristic of continental

philosophy and its masochistic relation to time. And while we are considering the

remarkable style(s) of Derrida, it is also worth briefly reinvoking the debate between

Derrida and Searle that is captured in Limited Inc. Can we not crudely summarise that

Searle demanded clarity and calculable answers and solutions, whereas Derrida

compounded problem upon problem, such that the distinct became obscure and the

obscure became distinct26, and then proceeded to play with Searle’s name? For

Derrida, as for Deleuze, problems expand indefinitely (to eternity) and one must be

patient enough not to too quickly close the problem down by proffering a solution. Of

course, while there is a necessity for urgency and decisions, it is clear that, for both

Derrida and Deleuze, any such decisions are not appropriately understood as of the

order of a rational solution. But to return to our concern with style, if Derrida,

Deleuze and Foucault can all be said to endorse a politics of style, a style of une

grande politique as Gregg Lambert has suggested27, their grand politics has a

distinctly masochistic edge to it. And what else, we might ask, could a politics of style

consist in, attentive as it is to the way in which the form of expression is so loaded

with significance and is so likely to undermine the literal content of the statement?

This kind of thought that examines and picks at its own presuppositions and internal

flaws, as well as the way they manifest themselves in the work of other philosophers,

theorists and artists, is decidedly masochistic.

What might we say, by contrast, about the style of the analytic tradition? Stylistically

it is generally minimalist: curt, clear, transparent, and often with a disavowal of the

use of metaphors, as has been widely discussed by continental feminist philosophers.

It believes that one can say what they mean, and, as is suggested by Deleuze’s

explication of sadism, tacitly accepts that too much attention to style (and historical

philology, etc.) can get in the way of the repetition and expansion of ideas. While we

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have seen that the analytic tradition suspends the law and continually exceeds the

pragmatic, it does not do it in the same slow and performative way as its continental

counterparts. Its concern is not so much with focusing on how laws immanently break

down and undermine themselves at the level of practice (whether that be in texts or in

the wider social milieu), but with instantiating new principles. While the frequent

discussions of rationality paradoxes often show how rationality can result in counter-

intuitive consequences, we can nevertheless observe that they have very different

interests in the phenomena of paradox to philosophers working in the European

tradition. It is not, however, simply that analytic philosophers seeks to overcome or

ameliorate paradoxes and the continental tradition seeks to perpetuate them (as

Derrida has frequently been accused of by some of his more unkind analytic

interlocutors). Rather, the important contrast to see is that those working in analytic

philosophy tend to produce paradoxes in thought and then cast a transcendent gaze

back upon the everyday world and its norms, but Deleuze, Derrida, and others, seek to

show that paradoxes and problems are the conditions of thought. For them, we

encounter paradoxes in the world, or in texts, and these provoke us to think and to

respond. These are very different ways of engaging philosophically with paradoxes:

the first being primarily concerned with the problems that can afflict reasons and

principles; the second with the immanent conditions of thought.

Linked in with the different styles of analytic and continental philosophy is their

respective treatments of the artistic itself (and the scientific). Deleuze suggests that in

the masochistic paradigm, the experience of the new (and the different) always has an

artistic sense: the art work, or the ritual, is envisaged as helping to make possible a

move from lower to higher nature (CC 76). Now it is, I think, uncontroversial to claim

that virtually all of the major European philosophers have been heavily concerned

with art, and with the relation of art to the creation of the new (in no particular order

consider Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger, Bergson,

etc.), even if they propound inaesthetics like Badiou28, and even if myriad Marxist

traditions have been highly wary of certain forms of art. On the other hand, Deleuze’s

typology tells us that sadism is indifferent and apathetic to works of art, and in this

context it is worth reflecting on, and perhaps even endorsing, Richard Campbell’s

suggestion that there is a tacit Platonism that persists in the analytic tradition29. After

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all, even if few analytic philosophers will explicitly proffer a Platonic rejection of art,

and even if there are certainly plenty of such philosophers working in aesthetics and

the philosophy of art, it seems clear that an engagement with art is not mandatory for

the major systematic philosophers in the tradition and, furthermore, that as a group

they are not preoccupied with art in the way that most continental philosophers

generally are. When it comes to political philosophy, to give another example, few

analytic philosophers devote any kind of sustained attention to the political value of

art, but in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari famously suggest that it is vital

to the summoning forth of a new people and a new earth, thus breaching the

boundaries between art and politics. In this respect, we should also reaffirm that it is

the analytic tradition which has been more heavily engaged with the findings of

science, whereas despite a certain philosophy of science reading of his work that has

been promulgated in recent times, Deleuze has suggested that, “every time science,

philosophy and good sense come together it is inevitable that good sense should take

itself for a science and a philosophy (that is why such encounters must be avoided at

all costs)” (DR 224)30.

However, as well as making perspicuous the divergent styles and methods of these

two traditions, Deleuze’s sadistic and masochistic typology also enables us to prise

apart some of the different metaphysical and ontological commitments of the two

traditions. After all, as Deleuze succinctly observes, the masochist needs to believe

that they are dreaming even when they are not, but sadism needs to be actual, to

believe that they are not dreaming even when they are (CC 72). In this respect, might

it not again be suggested that analytic philosophy falls into the sadistic paradigm,

needing to believe that they are dealing with hard facts? Certainly a concern with the

real and the actual are major features of the analytic tradition, dominated as it is by

physicalism, naturalism, and materialism (and I won’t attempt the labyrinthine job of

extricating them from one another here). Indeed, its concern with the actual and

physical often results in a denunciation of not just idealism but any form of

transcendental philosophy that is concerned with conditions of possibility31. While

both the technique of argumentation and the causal role of the transcendental are not

countenanced by many analytic philosophers, transcendental philosophy has had a far

more sympathetic heritage in the European tradition since Kant, whether we consider

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the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger, or, more recently, the role that is still

allocated to a reconceptualized understanding of the transcendental in Derrida and

Deleuze (where the transcendental refers to the virtual conditions of real

experience)32. And, of course, linked in with this privileging of the real and the actual

is the epistemological concern with objectivity and impartiality that is far more

characteristic of analytic philosophy (and sadistic apathy is arguably well-understood

as the affective excess of impartiality). In this respect, potential examples proliferate.

We might consider utilitarianism, acknowledged by Rawls to be the dominant moral

philosophy of the twentieth century, and which in its act utilitarian version is

explicitly committed to impartiality as a value and to the principle of choice for a

society being the same as for an individual. We might also consider the philosophy of

science, and, to pick out but one notable example, Huw Price’s attempts to re-

establish an Archimedean point for knowledge outside of the relativism that seems to

be a consequence of the special theory of relativity and our various anthropocentric

biases, most particularly the fact that our philosophising and thinking about time is

greatly effected by our own finite status as creatures in time33. While Price might

hence seem to agree with Heidegger, it is significant that he adopts the reverse

procedure and attempts to dispel rather than dwell on this paradoxical temporal

structure by reinstating an objective atemporality, a view from ‘nowhen’. Again, such

a move is characteristic of the analytic tradition generally, even if few have taken its

methodological assumptions of objectivity and impartiality to their logical extension

in the manner that Price so rigorously does.

Of course, it can and should be observed that this concern with the real and the actual

is not restricted to analytic philosophy. We have already seen a cultural move in this

direction, and Derrida’s Spectres of Marx shows us that most Marxists have likewise

tended to want to get rid of ghosts from the past and to establish that they were not

dreaming, that things were real (concrete) and the revolution inevitable34. Indeed, on

Derrida’s enigmatic analyses, Marx himself seems to have repeatedly been visited by

spectres. References to ghosts recur throughout all of Marx’s different texts and not

just the famous opening line of he and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto: “a spectre

is haunting Europe”. Although the ghost is sometimes invoked positively in Marx’s

work, as it is in this particular line, his revolutionary thrust is nevertheless still to

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attempt to get rid of the ghost, in this case by advocating a scientific lineage

(dialectical materialism) that will make socialism real and fully present, and finally

put an end to ideology. Marxism will no longer need to be the ghost that haunts

capitalism. In response to this tacit metaphysics of presence, this impatient time,

Derrida poses some questions that may seem rather ethereal. Is anything fully

present? Life itself? His answer seems to be no, and his long and patient analyses

show that a certain conceptual violence (in addition to the empirical facts of

Marxism’s history) is bequeathed to this privilege associated with being real, present,

and actual.

But is it also plausible then, to suggest the opposite? That the continental tradition

needs to believe, along with the masochist, that they are dreaming? We can begin to

argue this case by observing, negatively, that there is, in poststructuralism at least, a

strong denial of the conception of the philosopher as being the impartial and rational

seeker of the truth – i.e. Rorty’s mirror of nature. Instead, the job of philosophers, at

least on Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding, is to create concepts, we might say to

dream, and then to knit the results of that dream into a package with internal

consistency that links up with as many other modes of living and thinking as possible.

To risk a few further generalisations, we can also note that poststructuralists often

explicitly seek the impossible. Derrida, for example, has commented, “go there where

you cannot go, to the impossible, it is indeed the only way of coming or going”35,

suggesting that it is only the thinking that negotiates with the impossible and which

transgresses given boundaries that involves any real movement, sentiments that

abound in continental philosophy from Nietzsche and Bergson through to Deleuze.

Poststructuralists also often accord a certain privilege to the inactual (what Deleuze

calls the virtual), although this should not be taken to commit them to idealism. To

put it in Derrida’s terms from Spectres of Marx, there is a general concern, in this

post-Heideggerian tradition, with the spectral and the ghostly – or, somewhat

synonymously, différance – which is prior to, and the condition of, any ontology of

that which is actual or present. Moreover, as I argue in more detail elsewhere, in

Deleuze’s Logic of Sense there is a consistent valorisation of what he calls the

perverse-structure over the normalising and pacifying tendencies of the other-

structure; the former involves a play of surfaces and openness to the time of the event

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(Aion) that rejects any kind of embodied pragmatism that revolves around equilibria36.

Suffice to say, then, that I think that it is at least plausible to associate continental

philosophy with the masochist’s need to feel that they are dreaming, notwithstanding,

and perhaps even evidenced by, their consistently radical politics of the new and the

different.

While I cannot presume to have definitively established that here, what is hopefully

more clear is that there are certain risks associated with both of these tendencies, the

sadistic and the masochistic, the impatient analytic philosopher and the eternally

patient continental philosopher. To sum up, we might suggest that the risks involved

with analytic philosophy are of an excessive preoccupation with reasoning and the

calculable that ignores important background considerations and simplifies problems

in order to attain solutions (or procedures for solutions) that remain at a distance from,

or epiphenomenal to, the affective dimensions of the problem itself. On the other

hand, the risks at the heart of continental philosophy are of degenerating into an

eternally patient moral perfectionism, which eschews calculation in favour of stylised

prophesies and dreams of the disruptions of the future that might, although this has

not been established, never really get its hands dirty. This prompts an important

question: how are we to better proceed, with an eye on the ethico-political excesses

evinced by these two typologies that analytic and continental philosophers almost

inevitably have at least some symptoms of? Acknowledging that different

philosophers in both traditions will have different means for dealing with these

problems than others (and some far more effectively than others), it nevertheless

seems that a rapprochement that can bring these approaches together is called for. At

the same time, though, if Deleuze is right in arguing that sadism and masochism have

a transcendental significance, partaking differently in repetition-for-itself and the

futural synthesis of time, we will not be able to simply ignore or overcome this

movement towards the extreme. And there is certainly no throwing out of the desire to

dream, or, for that matter, the desire to be real and concrete. These are omnipresent

and must be negotiated with for any philosophy and politics that hopes to be more

than ideal. Moreover, if my typological reading of analytic and continental philosophy

is plausible, it is equally clear that no rapprochement of these traditions can simply

reintroduce that spurious sado-masochistic entity. In other words, we cannot unify

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these two traditions in a higher synthesis, even one that takes certain strengths from

each and casts aside the weaknesses. The traditions are too institutionally fortified

against one another for that, and, more importantly, they have too many temporal,

methodological and affective differences for such a procedure of distribution and

good sense to be coherent.

Nevertheless, our hands may not be tied for all that. We have seen that both the sadist

and the masochist differently seek to overturn the law (just as the respective

philosophies concerned also do), and to undermine the habitual movement towards an

equilibrium on which it is suggested the law is based (DR 5). Whether or not habitual

coping and the law are reducible to one another, however, hence becomes a key

question: perhaps such a conflation is problematic and illegitimately either passes

over, or casts aside, the complexities of the former (embodied coping) in tacitly

devaluing the latter (law, norms and convention). Moreover, even if one agrees with

the poststructuralist tradition that embodied coping is fundamental to the time of the

living-present (what Deleuze calls the time of Chronos), these repetitions do not

evince the problematic symptoms that we have seen in sadism’s accelerated

preoccupation with principles and the calculable, or in the decelerated time of

masochism’s affirmations of the incalculable (which Deleuze links to the time of

Aion). Do habitual and embodied coping techniques merely cover over these more

fundamental dimensions of time and repetition, as Deleuze’s own analyses in

Difference and Repetition suggest (and as Derrida also suggests in chapter one of

Politics of Friendship)? Or might sadism and masochism’s more excessive relations

to time and repetition be understood as important but not privileged dimensions of

social life and thought, with habit and embodied coping the ground for these

divergent responses? The latter view would make possible something tantamount to a

middle way, from which we could navigate between the different symptoms endemic

to analytic and continental philosophy, guarding against the various excesses that we

have delimited in this essay. What risks might be associated with such a move?

Would philosophy itself still be possible on such a view? Creativity? That remains to

be shown.

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Jack Reynolds is a Lecturer in Philosophy at University of Tasmania (Australia). He

is the author of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, Understanding Existentialism, and the

co-editor of Understanding Derrida. Jack is the series editor of Understanding

Movements in Modern Thought with Acumen Press, and the contintental pilosophy

editor for Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He is currently working on a

manuscript entitled Chronopathologies, which deals with the different relationships

between politics and time in the continental and analytic traditions respectively.

1 See the essay by Richard Campbell, ‘The Covert Metaphysics of the Clash Between Analytic andContinental Philosophy’, British Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2001, p341-59, aswell as the extended reply by Stephen Buckle, entitled ‘Analytic Philosophy and ContinentalPhilosophy: The Campbell Thesis Revisited’, in British Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 12,No. 1, 2004, p111-50. The recent compendium of essays, A House Divided: Comparing Analytic andContinental Philosophy, ed. C. Prado, Humanity Books, 2003, is also useful in regard to certainanalytic philosophers, especially Quine, Carnap, and Davidson. Taylor Carman and Todd May’srespective chapters on continental themes in analytic philosophy and analytic themes in continentalphilosophy, in the Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Philosophy (ed. C. Boundas, Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming) are also enlightening, with the former concerned about theway in which purported descriptions of the continental/analytic distinction in fact performativelycreate, or at least fortify, that very distinction. This deflationary response can be contrasted with BruceWiltshire’s rather forthright Fashionable Nihilism: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy, Albany: SUNYPress, 2002. One might also consider Stephen White’s Political Theory and Postmodernism,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, as well as the writings of Iris Young, Richard Rorty,Hubert Dreyfus, Chantal Mouffe and many others. Simon Critchley and Lester Embree have alsooffered divergent accounts of what continental philosophy itself is, which inevitably also involvesconsideration of its analytic ‘other’. In this respect, see Critchley, S., Continental Philosophy: A VeryShort Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, and Embree, L., ‘Husserl as the Trunk ofthe American Continental Tree’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2002.2 See Reynolds, J., ‘Negotiating the non-negotiable: Rawls, Derrida, and the intertwining of politicalcalculation and ultra-politics’, Theory and Event, Volume 9, Issue 3, 2006, and James Williams’chapter on Deleuze and Lewis in his book, The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze: Encounters andInfluences, Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2005. Methodologically, it seems to me that the two keyspoints of dispute centre around the value of thought experiments and the effort to reach reflectiveequilibrium between principles and our immediate judgments, sometimes called intuitions.3 See Sass, L., The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber and the Schizophrenic Mind,Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1995.4 It is true that analytic philosophy adheres to common sense more than European philosophy andavowedly so. As James Williams shows in his chapter on David Lewis, even Lewis’s philosophy ofpossible worlds is not prepared to leave this terrain behind. Moreover, one of the perennial lamentsfrom analytic philosophers is about the polysyllabic obscurity and lack of common sense of theircontinental counterparts. Even though the European philosophers are right in responding that commonsense may not, in fact, be all that common, there are good arguments to be proffered on behalf of bothsides of the debate and I’m not as sure as Deleuze is, for example, that common sense is antithetical tophilosophy.5 While my rather broad employment of the concepts of sadism and masochism in this essay can becontrasted with Deleuze’s quite specific treatment of them in ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, my main interestin using his categories is simply as a provocation for further thought on the analytic/continentalrelation. Reverting to more academic justifications for this apparent disparity, we can also emphasisethe wider use that these same concepts are put to by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, andrecognise, following Alain Badiou in the chapter on method in The Clamour of Being (trans. L.

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Burchill, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), that although Deleuze begins with certainspecific and singular cases, there is usually also a more generalising and transcendental use to whichthese cases are made to serve. I think that is also the case here.6 One merit of this manner of proceeding is that it puts time at the centre of the inquiry since, forDeleuze, there are vastly different temporalities involved in the respective repetitions of sadism andmasochism. In the broader research project of which this essay is a part, I argue that many of the majordifferences between poststructuralism and Anglo-American political philosophy come down to theirrespective conceptions of, and concerns with, the temporal. In this respect, thanks are due to theAustralian Research Council for their support of this project in the form of a Discovery Grant, 2005-7.7 Of course, this manner of proceeding is often contested within Anglo-American political philosophyitself. There are, for example, various discussions of weakness of will, wantonness, and their politicalsignificance. Harry Frankfurt has famously discussed such issues, and T. Reiff has recently written apaper titled ‘The Politics of Masochism’ (see Inquiry, Vol. 46, p29-63), but one can nonetheless note afamily resemblance in the concern with calculative reasoning and distributive justice, as well as,somewhat paradoxically, in an investment in the philosophical value of intuition. I take this up in moredetail in my previously mentioned essay on Rawls and Derrida.8 Sartre, J. P., Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. H. Barnes,London: Routledge, 1996 edition, p257.9 See Derrida, J., ‘Hostipitality’ in Acts of Religion, trans. S. Weber, ed. G. Anidjar, London:Routledge, 2002, p396.10 Kuhn, S., ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,http://www.plato.stanford.edu.11 See Williams, J., The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze, p138. Williams suggests that Deleuzerejects the analytic reliance upon thought experiments and counterfactuals because they involvesimplifications that hide the complexity of problems and that thereby devalue the image of thought.12 Consider, for example, the vast body of literature responding to Derek Parfit’s suggestion that if wetake utilitarianism’s criterion of maximising welfare seriously it might entail sacrificing the happinessof the 6 billion people currently present for the many more who are to come. See Parfit, D., Reasonsand Persons, Part 4, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.13 It is for this reason that Deleuze made the editorial decision to include in Masochism, along with hisown essay ‘Coldness and Cruelty’ and Sacher-Masoch’s novella Venus in Furs, some of the actualcontracts that Sacher-Masoch signed during his life with Wanda and others.14 In this respect, see many of the essays included in Derrida, J., Negotiations: Interventions andInterviews, ed. and trans. E. Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.15 In his recent summary of the key achievements of contemporary moral and political philosophy,Gilbert Harman claims that there is a consensus in this regard. See Harman, G., ‘Three trends in moraland political philosophy’, http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/Papers/Trends.pdf.16 The political significance of Heidegger’s ‘speaking against number’ (his argument that modernunderstandings of politics are over-determined through their relation to calculation), and the way inwhich this aspect of his work can offer a way of undermining his own Nazism, is well-documented byStuart Elden in his book, Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language, and the Politics ofCalculation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.17 As a sometime philosopher of the body, I have had the odd analytic philosopher look at me withincredulity when I admit that I am interested in the body. Of course, there are counter-examples to thistendency, with borderline figures like Hubert Dreyfus, as well as other more avowed ‘analytics’,preoccupied with both perception and the body. It would take another essay to establish the analyticturn away from the body, but it is perhaps partly evinced in many of the most famous thoughtexperiments, which often postulate or presuppose a divorce of mind and body, such as Hilary Putnam’scelebrated reflections on the brain in the vat.18 See, for example, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, p159, 162, 211, and Derrida’s Aporias (trans.T. Dutoit, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1993) p32.19 While any such order of priority might seem to be antithetical to deconstruction, see my previouslymentioned article, ‘Negotiating the non-negotiable’, which argues that despite his comments to thecontrary, Derrida consistently privileges the incalculable. For Negri, in Time for the Revolution (trans.M. Mandrini, London: Continuum, 2003), time itself is explicitly understood as the incalculable thatcannot be measured. He also talks of the priority of the to-come (p154) and the event (p140) andsuggests that “resistance is action outside of measure” (p174), indebted as he is to Deleuze’sthematisation of a radically different mode of distribution that cannot be understood in terms ofproperty, enclosure, or measure.

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20 This emphasis upon the way in which time breaks itself open toward an irrecuperable past and anunreachable future is also what Levinas (and Derrida) privileges. While Levinas does not, to myknowledge, talk of ‘eternity’ as Deleuze labels this aspect of time, he does call it the time of infinity incontrast with the finite time of the present. See Levinas, E., Time and the Other, trans. R. Cohen,Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987, p26, 76-7, 137.21 Patton, P., Deleuze and the Political, London: Routledge, 1999, p48.22 This cannot be addressed in detail here, but intuition has a significant role in the analytic tradition inat least two ways: first, in the importance that it accords to one’s immediate feelings on a particularproblem, even if this simple intuition requires moderation with considered reflection before it can formthe basis for a ‘reflective equilibrium’ (see the work of Nelson Goodman, John Rawls, Brad Hooker,etc., but this conviction that our immediate intuitions need to be accommodated is scarcely challenged,except by the odd act-utilitarian); second, in the methodological reliance upon our intuitively ‘seeing’the appropriateness of a particular thought experiment to stand in as a marker for the more complicatedproblem that is at issue.23 Although his work cannot be dealt with in any length here, it is also worth noting that Levinas alsoexalts the pure patience of passivity, something that we can associate with masochism. See, forexample, Time and the Other, p135.24 See Buckle, S., ‘Analytic Philosophy and Continental Philosophy: The Campbell Thesis Revisited’,British Journal of the History of Philosophy, 12 (1) 2004, p111-50, and Wiltshire, B., FashionableNihilism: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy, Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. As the title of his bookindicates, Wiltshire accuses the analytic tradition of nihilism and we can note in passing that there is arelationship between sadism and nihilism that remains to be explicated.25 Derrida, J., Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976,p158. There are those who argue, with good reason, that the French il n’y a pas de hors-texte is moreaccurately translated as “there is no outside of the text”. Since he first coined this aphorism, Derridahas also spent a lot of time reformulating its meaning and has suggested that it is more accuratelytranslated as “there is no outside of context” (cf. ‘Afterword’, Limited Inc. ed. G. Graff, trans. S.Weber, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998 edition, p136–7). Of course, engenderingcontroversy may have been Derrida’s strategic intent in initially endorsing the “there is nothing outsideof the text” translation, and if that was the case then he definitely succeeded.26 Interestingly, Deleuze follows Leibniz and insists that the clear and distinct are, if not mutuallyexclusive, then certainly incapable of being simultaneously co-present (cf. DR 213). Distinctnessdepends upon the background obscurity from which it comes.27 See Lambert, G., ‘Une Grande Politique, or the New Philosophy of Right?’, Critical Horizons, 4: 2,2003, p177-97.28 It must be admitted that Badiou is one continental philosopher who troubles this typology. Not onlyis his style comparatively sparse, but he also famously identifies mathematics with ontology, andthereby gives the calculable and the numerable a great weight than most. Nevertheless, it remains thecase that the event, which retains a priority in his work, is incalculable. See Badiou, A., Being andEvent, trans. O. Feltham, London: Continuum, 2005.29 Campbell, R., as previously cited.30 It seems to me that in What is Philosophy? such sentiments are tacitly reaffirmed. Despite the factthat Deleuze (with Guattari) theoretically puts science on an equal footing with art, it would not beparticularly difficult to perform a symptomatological reading of this text which shows that the perceptsand affects of the artwork attain a priority over the functives that Deleuze associates with science. Onthis point I am indebted to Jon Roffe.31 In this respect, see Malpas, J., ‘Introduction’, From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea ofthe Transcendental, London: Routledge, 2002. There are, again, exceptions to this attitude towardstranscendental philosophy in the analytic tradition, notably in the work of Davidson and Strawsonamong others, but on the whole it is treated with some suspicion.32 For some good secondary material on Derrida’s relation to the transcendental, see Lawlor, L., ‘TheRelation as the Fundamental Issue in Derrida’, Derrida and Phenomenology, eds. McKenna, W., andEvans, J., Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995. Lawlor’s article is one of the few even-handed treatments ofDerrida in this volume which, on the whole, is determined to rescue Husserl at all costs. See alsoColebrook, C., ‘Derrida’, From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental, ed.J. Malpas, London: Routledge, 2001.33 See Price, H., Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.34 See Derrida, J., Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the NewInternational, trans. P. Kamuf, New York: Routledge, 1994.

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35 Derrida, J., On the Name, ed. & trans. T. Dutoit, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, p75.36 This is dealt with in detail in an as yet unpublished manuscript of mine titled, ‘Deleuze’s Other-structure: Beyond the Master-Slave Dialectic, But at What Cost?’, but Deleuze’s disdain for equilibriais also part of the work of Levinas, Derrida, Negri, and the poststructuralist tradition generally.